I grew up in the sixties, and was 16 in the summer of 1969, the summer of Woodstock.  I have always loved Joni Mitchell’s song celebrating that festival, and have been thinking of these words:

With the song running through my head, I dug through my stash and found the large piece of fabric I had ‘parfait dyed’ a few years ago.  I’d never planned to cut it up, thinking I would do a large whole cloth piece, but it was so reminiscent of 1960s tie-dye that I sliced out a square and began to work.  I sandwiched the piece and using a slightly shiny polyester thread in yellow, machine stitched spiked quilting “rays” to emulate the sun, radiating from the upper left corner diagonally down to the lower corners – from sky to earth as it were.  There is a wide white swath between Heaven and Earth, across which stars and stardust are tumbling…back to the Garden.

Once quilted, I studded the ‘sky’ with tiny star-shaped sequins, secured by seed beads.  For the ‘stardust’, I added even tinier gold seed beads.  I tried to achieve a random placement of stars and ‘stardust’ across the ‘sky’.

Once that was complete, I turned my attention to the ‘earth’ — the Garden.  Using hand-dyed silk floss left from an embroidery project (purchased, not dyed by me), I used seed stitch to highlight areas of growth, and added ‘rainbow’ beads to suggest flowers.  There is a large dark brown area just right of centre that has been left empty — symbolizing, I think, the Fall — the part of the Garden that has yet to be redeemed.